I came from “dirty” “mixed-blood.” I’ve been hungry most of my life. All I ever knew was hard. But before, there was Cara. It was all I could do to wait for the lunch bell. She lingered across the field, by the wild honeysuckle that hung from the live oak tree. She came from Georgia. She was soft. Her whiteness flushed every time I got near. At ten, life without her was unimagined, until my mamma asked me, “Does Cara know you’re not a boy?”
Gary J. Gates 2011 study, of How many people are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, shows “an estimated 0.3% of adults (in the United States) are transgender.” I am a boy. I am a girl. At times, I am neither, and I am never all the one and much less, the predominantly viewed-as-weaker. Do not call me miss and excuse it as southern etiquette. “That’s just how I was raised.” It is foil on my teeth, a civil right for all the times I have heard it. Mr., Mrs., Miss., nothing fit. Where are the boxes on the forms for me? Are you this or are you that, and if you are neither or both because both is not allowed, skip to the end. You do not exist. 1920 saw the right of women to vote signed into law. My two states were among the last six to lift their thumbs, but to vote, you had to be a boy, or you had to be a girl.
“Texas saw a jump from 39 hate crimes based on anti-gay bias in 2010 to 49 in 2011” (Web, 2012). Both Texas and Louisiana, even now, harbor an infestation of dragons and while “Black Americans have typically been the Klan’s primary target, it also has attacked gays and lesbians (and transgendered). Today, “the (Southern Poverty Law) Center estimates that there are (currently) between 5,000 and 8,000 Klan members” (2014). This is much lower than in the 1960s, with an estimated membership as high as 50,000. Some of these members are openly anti-anyone that is not them, others conceal their bigotry and prejudice under the hood of ‘rights for whites’ (SPLC web journal). October, 2011, four men stabbed a young gay man twice with a broken beer bottle then threw him onto a fire. They yelled epithets: “pussy-ass faggot, gay bitch, and cock-sucking punk.” In the valley of the white worm, having a vagina meant “do what you’re told, shut up, and spread em.” Neither Mamma nor me were having any of that. In 1973, I got Superman for Christmas instead of Barbie Doll. She got a divorce from her four-year husband and launched her career.
In 1996, the leaders of a Georgia church decided “to disinter the body of a mixed race infant who was buried in the church’s all-white cemetery. On the 1990 census almost ten million people marked their race as ‘Other’.” I am white, dirty white, but mostly, I am dirty red. In the 1960s, “the United States began to experience a biracial baby boom,” and though interracial marriages had finally been legalized, the majority of southern whites were slow to come around. Mamma pounded and fired her red clay in a one-drop-rule kiln. She wanted me to be as hard as the stones she’d carved herself from. She gave me an autographed copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull for my 8th birthday, and a trip to the old Cotton Mill Block.
Shanty shacks surrounded the scarred rusty cinderblock and brick cotton mill like a rotting picture frame, company dwellings with dirt floors and no glass in the windows, block after block of ghosts with dirty babies and dirty skin. Mamma had been born there, along with nine brothers and sisters. She spent her life trying to fill the hole that digging out leaves. My Pap-Paw picked cotton in the fields and kept the Mill’s grounds, while my half-blood Cherokee grandmother, Miss Beatrice, gave birth and cleaned. Only whites got to work inside the mill. Everybody else, old enough and young enough to walk, worked the earth all day in the gritty, sweltering heat.
To us kids, it was “Miss Beatrice” or the burn of a switch to the back of the legs, so much told in the naming of a thing. Grandmother was to Indian what ‘miss’ was to youth, and Beatrice was to a white Sunday dress in a bleach-scrubbed dingy whitewashed church, with a cross that said worship this. She traded in my Pap-Paw for God, a vile, devilishly handsome, five foot, nine inch, blue-eyed white man with a taste for little girls. I did not think Miss Beatrice loved anything, until one day, when I was four, sitting on her big white porch, I saw her see a truck on the road hit her favorite dog. She went out to its still-beating heart and smeared red guts, knelt, and strangled the life from it. Disney is not to love what Beatrice was.
An “era of self-conscious reshaping of images of Indians… beginning in the 1960s,” and the newly formed AIM (American Indian Movement) began to address the racist treatment of Native Americans in film, media and the American culture. But it failed to address us. For my family, it was too late. We already hated ourselves and had no ties to our Native American Nations, though occasionally, we would visit Great Grandmother. We had successfully integrated into the lowest of the American classes: poor “mixed-bloods” who saw themselves as white. I was told Pap-Paw returned to the reservation where he had died in a boundary ditch by the side of the road. He’d been struck by a passing car or truck that didn’t stop to see if he was alive. He lay in that ditch for two days before he gave it up. It was too bad Beatrice had not seen him from her rented, whitewashed porch.
Pap-Paw was a quiet man. I heard him speak once, and only once. I was five. He had taken me on horseback to fish at a natural spring-fed rock quarry. There was a small herd of Buffalo grazing at the foothills on the prairie grass-patched, red and brown stone-strewed plain. He got down and reached to lift me from the horse’s back, and I was very small compared to a buffalo, so I said, “No. I’m scared.” He took me in his large brown hands, lifted me from the horse, and put me on the ground then bent and sliding his hands to my shoulders, said, “This is the easy part.” My paler hand in his, he led me and the horse through the meandering herd to the water’s edge. That was all I recall him ever saying and the words have stuck with me my whole life.
Mamma spoke in reds and whites, no in betweens. It was piss or get off the pot with her. There were never any abstracts. She was always concrete and clear. No one would get in her way or slow her down. I kept up because offspring that survived were not slow or weighty. Survival was a costly thing. Polio, by the 1960s, had been nearly eradicated. There were a few stray cases, of which I was one. At night, when the pain was unbearable, mamma would sit up till morning, rubbing what relief she could into my tiny right leg from her hands. In exchange, during the day, I performed like all the other kids, though I was not. She accepted nothing less. If the fox senses a pup to weak, it does not invest. Mother chose to not strangle the life out of me and bore the weight of it. Love is rock steady and strong, not weak or pliable or temporary. It does what it must and doesn’t waste valuable energy shedding tears over life not being fair; it is not, “and whoever told you it was, lied to your ass,” Mother always said.
According to the American Cancer Society, invasive epithelial ovarian cancer at stage 4 has an 18% survival rate. It had been growing in Mamma’s womb since she was twelve or thirteen. How does a twenty six year old survive the removal of a basketball-sized mass of tumors, and half their intestines, and half their stomach, and half their pelvic wall, and the rest of their life? They do not. They go in and out of surgeries and other invasive procedures, in and out of comas, in and out of sanctioned and unsanctioned trials, in and out of remission, all the while, in and out of oncology wards, until finally, they die from ovarian cancer metastasized at the age of 53. The little brown bottle was placed in my hand. The nurse said that I would know what to do with it and when then left. I come from a ghost with red bones under lightly freckled, brown, translucent skin. I thought of Beatrice and her dog, and I thought of Pap-Paw, “This is the easy part.”
Cara’s hip-hugger bellbottoms were new. Her nails were magic marker blue. Little gold and diamond ear-studs sparkled at her earlobes in the lacy glinting sunlight of early afternoon. She loves me. She loves me not. I exhaled, and the words came spilling out and a second later, I wished that I could, somehow, take it all back, but it was too late. She was gone, no goodbye, just soft converse footprints, trailing off through the grass, back the way she came. I wanted to call after her, but what was the use. By the middle of the next week, she had a new boyfriend. I asked Mamma why she had made me do it. “Love is hard,” was all she said.
Sources
Centuries of Citizenship. A Constitutional Timeline. National Constitution Center. Constitution Center.org. 2012.
Cruz, Barbara C. and Berson, Michael J. Laws That Banned Mixed Marriages. Jim Crow
Museum of Racist Memorabilia. University of Southern Florida. Article. May, 2010.
Everett, Dianna. American Indian Movement. Oklahoma State University. Oklahoma’s
Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History. Article. 2010.
Gates, Gary J. How Many People are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered? The
Williams Institute, School of Law, University of California. April, 2011.
Hate Crime Statistics 2011. Dallas Voice. Article. December 12, 2012.
History of Polio. Polio Eradication Initiative. Polio eradication.org. Article. 2010.
Ku Klux Klan. Southern Poverty Law Center. Intelligence Files. Journal. 2013.
Sack, Kevin. Title Unknown. New York Times. Article. March 29, 1996.
Survival Rates for Ovarian Cancer by Stage. American Cancer Society. 2013.
The Ku Klux Klan: Legacy of Hate. Anti Defamation League. Journal. 2013.
Wilson, Pamela. Native Americans. Oxford Bibliographies. Journal. 2013.
Wright, John. Title Unknown. Dallas Voice. Article. October 31, 2011.
2011 Hate Crime Statistics Report. Criminal Justice Information Services Division. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2011.
Trace Taylor 